From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Every year, the New Yorker throws a huge festival that lasts the whole weekend.

And recently I had the pleasure of sitting down for a whole hour on stage

with one of the great musicians and songwriters of our time,

somebody I've admired since I'm a kid.

And God knows I'm hardly the

only one. This event sold out. This was Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan in six seconds.

I first set eyes on Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973. I was 14, a North Jersey boy, and I told my

parents some outrageous lie about what I was doing, and I took a bus

across the river all by myself to New York City. I had a $4 ticket to see a band called Chicago,

which was a huge band at the time, and they had a big hit called 25 or 6 to 4. I have no

idea what that means. And I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square

Garden, the blue seats, and outtrundled the opening act, a skinny guitar slinger and songwriter

from down the shore. And this guy was outrageous. He was like the white James Brown. He was singing,

dancing, stabbing at his guitar, leading the band with a

crazy urgency, bursting all the while through the indifference of a huge arena crowd that had not

come to see him. They had come to see Chicago. And in every sense, he was brilliant. And so soon,

things started to explode for Bruce Springsteen. One reviewer wrote about him, I've seen the

future of rock and roll. That was John Landau. And that became the consensus view of Springsteen in

rock circles. He was the future. And suddenly he was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in one week.

Now, 40 years later, 20 Grammys down the road, an Academy Award and Kennedy Center

...